Hussein Chalayan Sent Fashion Into the Stratosphere With His High-Concept ’90s Shows

London, March 1999. Audrey Marnay walks onto a stark white stage in an empty go-kart track hired by Hussein Chalayan for his Fall Echoform show. She’s wearing a white dress molded from shiny fiberglass pieced together like the fuselage of an airplane. While she stands stock-still, a segment of the dress starts sliding apart of its own accord: It’s readying for takeoff! A little smile slowly spreads across Audrey’s seraphic face. Then, pop! A flap opens in the hem of her skirt, as if for midair refueling. Laughter, surprise, delight, riotous applause.

This was just one of the times, never to be forgotten, that Hussein Chalayan left his audience breathless with astonishment in the nineties. He was to do it again (and still does), but looking back, Chalayan’s Audrey as an airplane stands as a symbol of the moment London truly went into liftoff.

Bang-on halfway through the decade, when big fashion changes tend to crystallize, it had been suddenly game-on between Chalayan and Alexander McQueen. It was a matter of the simultaneous emergence of two talents. In the “conceptual” corner was Chalayan, a Turkish Cypriot designer who’d graduated with a BA from Central Saint Martins College of Art in 1993, with a collection of dresses he’d covered in iron filings, buried, then disinterred. And in the “aggro-chic” corner was Alexander McQueen, the designer who’d roared out of the same college with an MA one year before.

Between the pair of them—chalk and cheese, rivals and peers—McQueen and Chalayan elevated British fashion to a level of high-production performance art. As Chalayan remembers it: “We took risks. So did Lee. There was a fearlessness. I always wanted the shows to be a cultural experience. I wanted to use live music, choreography, technology. I wanted to share certain things I felt with others; I thought, Why do things which had been done before?”

Arriving at Chalayan’s shows, you’d be holding your breath: You knew to come prepared—even steeled—to have your emotions catapulted somewhere far beyond the limits of any normal fashion rigmarole. While McQueen plunged us into his dark, violent, history-shadowed theater of fashion, Chalayan led us into starkly lit enactments of complex theory that quickly attracted the “conceptual” tag. It was often difficult to express exactly what had happened afterward. The thrill and wonder of it all was always tinged with a worrying sense that there was something distressing going on beneath. That turned out to be the case even with that amusing Audrey incident in 1999: “It was the time after the first Iraq War,” Chalayan told me recently. “Operation Desert Fox, Audrey became a plane.”

Chalayan was plainly a brilliant engineer of shape—his fit-and-flare dresses with their multiply-gored skirts and his sinuous, cutout jersey sheaths are some of the most ingenious constructs to have come out of the nineties’ minimalist tendency. But what about his meanings? Great fashion in those days had to have subtext. In Chalayan’s shows, there was subtext under subtext, and further down, submerged at even deeper levels, autobiography.

His references to aviation and flight paths and astonishing futuristic cone-headed aliens were a soaring visual delight, but also hinted at the separation anxiety of a small boy who had had to shuttle between England and his home in Nicosia, Cyprus. In his very first collection, Cartesia, for Fall 1994, there had been paper air-mail jackets that made an image jump into my head of someone longing to send themselves home. Björk, always the first to snap up avant-garde British designers, wore one on the cover of her 1995 album, Post.

Then there was the tabloid-scandalizing time when Chalayan ended Between, his Spring 1998 show, with six models in black chadors of ever-decreasing length—the shock being that some girls were naked from the waist down, the last completely nude save for a face covering. Most definitely no designer could attempt that now, but at the time Chalayan never meant to cause offense: “It was about how we define our territory culturally.”

Chalayan has chalked up more than 20 years in a business that’s changed dramatically since he famously dug that hole for his graduation dresses. Intellectual explorations and attention to cut are the constants that continue to drive him, but when all’s said, it’s the brilliant ideas he laid down in the nineties that have taken him all the way.